In July 1979 Donald Gene Miller, twenty-four, a Michigan State University criminal justice graduate already in custody for attacking two children, led police to the skeletons of four women. He took them first to remains in Clinton County, which were Martha Sue Young and Kristine Rose Stuart, and a few days later to a thicket in Delta Township where the remains of Wendy Bush were recovered. He admitted killing all four, and Marita Choquette too. An assistant prosecutor said a "great hate for women" had driven him. Because of a plea arrangement and a lack of corroborating evidence, the same prosecutor said, he might spend only nineteen years in prison for them.
Miller was born in Lansing on December 28, 1954, and was a youth minister at his church. Martha Sue Young, nineteen, a French student at Michigan State, had broken off their engagement three days before New Year's Eve 1976. In the early hours of January 1, 1977, during a New Year's outing in his car, he strangled her. Her parents reported her missing, and witnesses had last seen her with him, but without a body he was released after questioning. That October hunters found her clothes and purse near a lake, her underwear folded neatly underneath.
The next killings came eighteen months later. On June 15, 1978, he stabbed Marita Choquette, twenty-seven, an assistant editor at WKAR-TV, seventeen times, then cut off her hands because, he told investigators, he could not get the handcuffs off. He covered her body with cinderblocks on a property in Alaiedon Township. On June 27 he strangled Wendy Bush, twenty-one, a Michigan State student who had refused his invitations more than once, in a parking lot near Spartan Stadium. On August 14 he met Kristine Guske Stuart, thirty, a schoolteacher, as she walked home from an auto repair shop, and killed her.
Two days later he broke into a house on Canal Road, found fourteen-year-old Lisa Gilbert alone, raped her and was trying to kill her when her thirteen-year-old brother, Randy, came in. Randy was choked and stabbed; both children survived, and the attack led to Miller's arrest. He was convicted of rape and attempted murder in Eaton County and sentenced to thirty to fifty years.
He was never tried for murder. In exchange for leading investigators to the bodies, he was allowed to plead guilty to manslaughter; reports differ on whether the plea covered two of the killings or all four. The Michigan parole board has since refused to release him; the most recent denial reported came in June 2021.